With such an oversupply of labour who'll do anything to break into that industry, or to have an income again after their studio dissolved and laid everyone off, a union that studios can't ignore...
With such an oversupply of labour who'll do anything to break into that industry, or to have an income again after their studio dissolved and laid everyone off, a union that studios can't ignore seems like an impossible task to get rolling, yet the Screen Actors Guild must have been in a similar situation once and somehow pulled it off:
Many high-profile actors refused to join SAG initially. This changed when the producers made an agreement amongst themselves not to bid competitively for talent. A pivotal meeting, at the home of Frank Morgan, was what gave SAG its critical mass. Prompted by Eddie Cantor's insistence, at that meeting, that any response to that producer's agreement help all actors, not just the already established ones, it took only three weeks for SAG membership to go from around 80 members to more than 4,000. Cantor's participation was critical, particularly because of his friendship with the recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After several years and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, the producers agreed to negotiate with SAG in 1937.
With such an oversupply of labour who'll do anything to break into that industry, or to have an income again after their studio dissolved and laid everyone off, a union that studios can't ignore seems like an impossible task to get rolling, yet the Screen Actors Guild must have been in a similar situation once and somehow pulled it off: